


remembers loving

by merlin



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 18:17:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1697900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merlin/pseuds/merlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How do you feel?” He can hear the other get to his feet.</p><p>“Refreshed,” he says, surprising himself. “I haven’t slept that well in a while. My mind is…” Clear, he wants to say. Clean. Scrubbed. Disinfected. He doesn’t say any of that.</p><p>Steve smiles. He remembers Steve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	remembers loving

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to and because of R, M, S, S, and A. You know who you are.
> 
> This fic deals with memory loss, brainwashing, and certain other losses of bodily and mental autonomy. If you require more details, please refer to the notes at the end. I put them there because they kind of give away the plot a little.

He wakes with a gasp.

The room is dimly lit, but it’s intentional soft lighting, not the flickering gloom of a once-abandoned bank vault or warehouse basement. There’s soft music playing, oddly clean without the skin-on-skin friction sounds of a record, and for a long moment he thinks he’s finally died and gone to wherever death leads.

“Bucky.” It’s breathed into the cool air, a prayer, a benediction, a sigh. “You’re awake.”

He doesn’t feel right. He hasn’t felt right in years and years, and the memories of circuitssteelfleshbloodbone pulse deep within his mind. They don’t trouble him; they’re present, but not intrusive.

He’s not sure it’s a good thing.

“How do you feel?” He can hear the other get to his feet.

“Refreshed,” he says, surprising himself. “I haven’t slept that well in a while. My mind is…” Clear, he wants to say. Clean. Scrubbed. Disinfected. He doesn’t say any of that.

Steve smiles. He remembers Steve. “We found a way to break through to you,” he explains as he pours out a measure of water and hands it over. Metal curls around glass, which is cool against flushed skin. One of these things is not like the others. The smile widens. “Welcome back, jerk.”

-

It turns out he remembers everything, but there’s a strange detachment from any memories created after 1945; after Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes turned into codename Winter Soldier. “It’s part of the process,” Steve told him, hands clasped in front of him and eyes the colour of the American flag. “You - Bucky - weren’t that person, and when we got you back, those memories were... locked away, in a manner of speaking.”

They’ve let him walk around the premises, carefully, so carefully, as if he’s been in bed for the past few weeks and needs to relearn how to use his muscles, as if it hasn’t only been a month since he was effortlessly putting his left hand through human flesh and teeth and skulls. He doesn’t remember how they found him, in the end; Steve assures him there hadn’t been a fight, nobody was hurt except maybe a couple of HYDRA double-crossers, and what’s important now is healing.

A man named Sam comes to visit once a week, speaking firmly but gently about coping with easing back from the war, but his eyes are sad and he makes an effort to never touch or speak to or even look at Steve. There are others, women and men, but he doesn’t bother to get to know them.

Eventually, he’s packed up and moved to a gleaming, soaring building in the middle of a New York City he doesn’t know, where Steve makes eggs in the morning and pasta in the evening, stretching his repertoire of cookery skills as far as they will go. They exist quietly as Manhattan zooms by beneath their feet, all red and yellow and a stretch of lush green, and time passes.

Time passes, trickles like water from a faulty faucet. More people visit, including Sam and his bottled-up sorrow. There’s a man named Tony and another man named Bruce and a woman named Pepper; there’s a man who only ever speaks to them through the speakers in the ceiling, and his name is Jarvis. The woman with the deep black hair - “you may call me Talia” - is the opposite of Sam; each time she arrives, she clutches Steve by the arm and drags him into his room and spends almost an hour locked in the room with Steve, and there are raised voices and abrupt thumps and crashes. Maybe they’re fighting, maybe they’re fucking.

He’s not sure he wants to know.

Forty-seven days after they first move into the tower, as the sun oozes into the horizon like a runny yolk that spreads across the streets and buildings and cars and tiny, tiny people, Steve sits down on the bed beside him. They haven’t touched each other at all since he woke up in that room, and he remembers Steve, but he’s not sure he remembers what Steve feels like. He remembers the way Steve’s shield rang when struck by his - the Soldier’s - fist, but he cannot recall the taste of Steve’s skin, even though he’s certain he’s supposed to.

“Bucky,” Steve says, and reaches to brush tentative fingers against tense thigh muscles. “I-”

The air goes out of the room, and he (re)learns what Steve feels, sounds, tastes like.

-

He wakes with a gasp.

The room is dark despite the gleam of daylight at the edges of the darkened windows, and the bed is empty. Glowing numbers on the nightstand inform him that it’s three days later than it should be.

The door opens. “Hey there,” Steve says, holding out a mug of hot chocolate. “You slept for a while.”

“Three days?” His voice is raspy. He drinks some of the chocolate.

“You woke up in the middle a few times.” He doesn’t remember this. He doesn’t remember a lot of things. He does remember a bridge, a train, a home; he remembers loving Steve.

They sit back against the pillows, and talk about pie and rifles and cabbage soup. The chocolate is warm and sweet, and Steve kisses it off his lips. Bucky thinks maybe the future isn’t too bad.

Their routine continues. Sam is steady and concerned, and continues to ignore Steve entirely. Bucky thinks maybe they had a fight; Steve always had a worrying tendency to pick fights. Tony keeps visiting, even as he natters on and on about how he’s a busy man with a busy schedule. He never touches Bucky, though, who can’t help but feel like maybe Steve’s friends aren’t as okay with him as they pretend to be. Bruce is nice but distant, Pepper pops in to say hi but never stays for long, and Talia is just angry. She’s not angry at him, she tells Bucky softly when she catches him staring at her glaring at Steve; she’s just disappointed in humanity. She’s stopped locking herself in rooms with Steve, so Bucky wonders if they had been fucking after all.

As their visitors come and go like seawater against an indifferent beach, Bucky watches a lot of television and learns how to use the internet. He uses the internet to look up recipes, and takes over cooking duties from Steve. He sleeps through several days a couple more times, but Steve always tells him it’s not unexpected; his mind is recovering. Steve is warm beneath the fingers of Bucky’s right hand, warm and golden and beautiful. Bucky remembers loving Steve.

From what Steve has said over the weeks, Bucky concludes that while HYDRA is no longer the threat it once was to the world, it continues to be a threat to Steve and his maybe-friends personally. There’s also the unspoken acknowledgement that Bucky was once a HYDRA asset, and they may want to collect what they see as theirs.

One Thursday afternoon, this theory proves to be true. Glass shatters, alarms go off, and Bucky’s fighting off five people at once, armed only with a kitchen knife and a rolling pin - and the mechanical arm he seems to remember how to use as a weapon after all. Steve is out, Bucky isn’t sure where and why, so it’s just him and over a dozen people in black body armour. 

One of them pulls out a rod that crackles with electricity. It’s meant for him. Bucky remembers that. What he doesn’t remember or even got to learn until two minutes ago is that Tony Stark has a robot suit - it crashes in through the last intact window and fires off several short bursts from its palms. It doesn’t get to the attacker with the cattle prod in time, and Bucky’s world narrows down to pain and burning and his left arm whirring to a stop, and he can see the electricity coursing along lines under the skin that was exposed when his shirt had torn, no, it’s not his shirt that was torn it’s his skin that’s gaping open to expose--

-

He wakes with a gasp.

He’s still in the kitchen. He still hurts all over. The attackers are gone. The windows are still broken, shards of glass all over the floor and the couch and--

He sits up and presses a hand to his side.

There’s a flap of cotton, and beneath that there’s a flap of what feels like flesh but isn’t covered with blood like it should be, there’s only something dark and distinctly not red oozing from further within his torso. He can see a mess of wires and pistons in his side - his right side, the side that’s supposed to be flesh and bone and human - and something is very, very wrong.

“Bucky,” says Steve, who looks sad, not shocked, not scared. He feels something inside him die. He scrambles backwards, the steel of his fingers screeching against the tile. “Bucky, listen to me--”

“ _What did you do to me,_ ” he screams, and his face is wet the way his hands aren’t, but he doesn’t think it’s blood on his cheeks. His right hand clenches and more of the skin-that-isn’t tears away, revealing more and more machinery and metal and wires that are wrong wrong _wrong_. “What am I?” His throat burns in a way his body doesn’t.

With sudden clarity, he remembers waking up after days of unconsciousness; he remembers wondering why he sometimes woke to the lingering, spicy scent of Tony Stark’s cologne and the acrid smell of ozone; he remembers chalking it up to the man’s perfume being as annoying and hard to get rid of as the man himself.

He remembers his left arm. He flexes; the fingers move. He remembers his left arm, and what it’s capable of.

He reaches across himself, clutches with inhuman strength; it’s like taking a glove off. It doesn’t hurt. No, that’s not true; it hurts, it hurts so much, but it’s a distant sensation, dulled by the screaming in his mind. His right hand is like a mockery of his left; steel and wires and an elastic material that mimics muscles, and he can’t do this, he can’t. He claws his way to his feet, pushes past Steve, and slams the bedroom door behind him. He wants to leave the apartment, the building, the city, but he has two metal arms and is covered in blood that’s not his and oil that is, and there is nowhere he can go.

He hears Steve sit down outside his door. “You’re Bucky,” Steve says, softly, voice shaking, as if it’s his world that’s been torn apart. “You’re James Buchanan Barnes of the 107th, and you’re my best friend.”

He talks for hours, talks about bottles of wine in an empty bar in England, talks about how he and Sam had found a broken body where the Winter Soldier was supposed to be, shattered by overwhelming numbers and a few well-placed bullets. He talks about the sprawling complex of outdated tapes and machines that had been blown to pieces long before the fight on the bridge, and then he talks about the building near Kiev full of modern technology that performed the same function as the hidden basement of Camp Lehigh - but the servers in Ukraine had contained a different consciousness, a person within its data banks: ninety years’ worth of memories and experiences and knowledge, all belonging to a man once known as Bucky.

Steve talks about Stark technology bringing a corpse to life. Steve talks about months of fights with Sam Wilson and Natalia Romanova. Steve talks about love and loss and a life that wasn’t his to return until his voice runs out, and then he whispers apologies over and over and over, whispers them through the door and walls at what he believes to be his lover and best friend and the other half of himself.

-

He doesn’t wake. He hasn’t slept; one cannot wake from a sleep one was never in, and one cannot wake from a nightmare if the nightmare is real. Steve is no longer at the door, having gone in search of sustenance or solace or something else he can’t get while he’s sitting in front of a silent bedroom. The apartment is silent save for the wind howling outside the broken windows.

He stands in front of them now. The sidewalk is eighty-two floors down; it would take an hour to get there by stairs, a minute by elevator, and a second by air. He steps back from the windows instead, and turns. He isn’t Bucky, hasn’t been Bucky since he fell from a speeding train in 1945. He remembers falling; it woke him up some nights, an endless silent scream never leaving his frozen lips. He remembers being taller than Steve, but never bigger than him.

He remembers loving Steve.

Four hours later, Steve returns to an empty apartment.

Four days later, an explosion tears through an empty silo on the outskirts of Kiev; later, after the fires have been put out, authorities would notice that the rubble contains an unusual amount of metal for a building made of brick and wood.

Four weeks later, a hard drive is delivered to Stark Tower. Plugged into a computer, it opens to display only two icons: an executable file, and a text document.

Four months later, the ragtag group popularly known as the Avengers is called to help stop an impending alien invasion at the border of the United States and Canada. As a sleek black jet touches down near the Niagara Falls and a blond man tucks a miniscule communicator into his ear, someone stirs within a hidden data centre on a basement level of Stark Tower that doesn’t technically exist.

“Hey, punk.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals with memory loss and brainwashing. The memories and consciousness of a character are 'backed up' electronically (through means that we totally don't understand even in canon) without their consent. These are then implanted within an artificial body without their consent. They eventually find out about it, and freak out accordingly. There is also mention of graphic violence, and implied suicide, and thoughts thereof.
> 
> If any of these warnings were insufficient, or if you feel like I handled any issues in a way that is harmful, please do let me know and I will edit accordingly.


End file.
